Do Parenting Styles Recycle Each Generation?

Page 286 from Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1854 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe, a description of the Silent Generation (1925-1942) childhood during the Great Depression and World War II:

“a layoff, a foreclosed home, the combat death of a father.” “… midlife Lost adults who regulated the child’s world with the heaviest hand of the twentieth century.” Sound familiar?

I wonder how many of my Gen-X peers over-protecting their children realize they’re not the first generation to take this approach during an era of naive utopianism in the White House, economic collapse at home, and genocidal antisemites arming themselves for war abroad.

See from March, Megan Fox’s 5 Problems with Gen-X Attachment Parenting

And published today, Rhonda Robinson’s 5 Insane Fads New Parents Swallow

Related, at The Wall Street Journal last month Daniel Henninger declared: It’s 1936 All Over Again:

But faced with the rather unhappy challenge of mounting a re-election campaign coincident with three years of rampant unemployment and next-to-no growth, little wonder Mr. Obama is looking for help from afar. And so it is that the ghost of a president past is indeed haunting the Obama White House—the ghost of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

FDR ran his first re-election campaign in 1936 when the United States was mired in the Great Depression. Barack Obama is running for the last time amid what he himself immortalized as the Great Recession. No surprise that Mr. Obama in his campaign speeches is channeling the master of Depression-era politics.

It worked back then. FDR walloped a somnambulant Republican candidate, Alf Landon, of whom the columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote: “Considerable mystery surrounds the disappearance of Alfred M. Landon of Topeka, Kansas.” But will Roosevelt’s politics work against Mitt Romney, who we presume will report for duty?